Thoughts on Perl and Emacs, technology and writing

Posts Tagged ‘perl’

I’m a huge fan of code reuse, and I tend to trust other people’s public code more than my own private code. After all, if they put effort into making it public, they must have put a lot of thought into it. And more than likely it is probably their speciality. That’s why I don’t (for example) implement my own webservers🙂 Having said that, I’ve reimplemented more wheels than I care to admit. Here is me, providing my own version of identity – a built-in emacs function. How embarrassing. Almost put me off blogging that did.

So, I try to do a bit of due dilligence when I’m thinking about writing a simple thing that someone surely has already done. What I want, is an interprocess mutex. There must be a million ways of doing these things, so I have a quick look on CPAN. Searching for mutex brings up LockFile::NetLock which looks interesting (although slightly paranoid, and I don’t have my own ftp server).

dmake.EXE: Error code 129, while making 'Semaphore.o'
MJP/POSIX-RT-Semaphore-0.05.tar.gz
C:\strawberry\c\bin\dmake.EXE -- NOT OK
Running make test
Can't test without successful make
Running make install
Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible

Yep, I was right. I’ll spare you the results from the other hour I spent googling various things like semaphore and process mutex.

Okay, let’s think about this. Maybe I could write my own simple little thing with a nice API, and if I find a decent module later I can delegate to it, or maybe delegate to Win32::Semaphore on Windows and the SysV version everywhere else. The ACE guys call that a wrapper facade. Does flock work on Windows?

So the plan is to call flock LOCK_EX on a file in the constructor, and then flock LOCK_UN in the destructor in a kinda RAII way. Famous last words, but what else could I possibly need?

Something a casual user of a language will miss out on, is using the latest and greatest libraries of that language and generally programming in a modern style. For example, I1 still naturally use open(FH, 'filename') || die; and have to force myself to use the more modern open(my $fh, '<', 'filename') with its lexically scoped filehandle.

I have been programming Perl for 12 years or so, but aside from one conference (YAPC Muenchen 2002) I’ve never really immersed myself in the community. For this reason, I think I have missed out on quite a few niceties. Moose, DBIx and other modules bring Perl up to the level of its contemporaries if you don’t need to work with people who are not using them. I only came across POE recently (which I keep mentioning because it is so awesome).

Heck, even C++ has boost.

Modifiable Syntax

or DSLs I think they call it.

Ray Dillinger once pointed out that people write scheme in a variety of incompatible styles because the substrate isn’t pleasant for programming on directly. But it is possible to layer any sugar you like on it. This leads to a bunch of different and practically incompatible styles.

Anyway, what I see is that scheme programmers are capable of
doing a heck of a lot as individuals, and are very happy with
the personally-customized language they each work with. But
they tend not to work together on large projects because of
the cognitive overhead of learning each other’s personally-
customized languages, which may have different or conflicting
definitions.

Common Lisp programmers, by contrast, have a lot of standard
libraries and tend to forgive or ignore some small things that
may not fit perfectly with their personal style. But they do
work together on large projects, because they all have the same
set of language extensions and they can read each other’s code.

I still find eager comprehensions about the nicest way of specifying nested loops that I’ve seen. Perl syntax tweaking dudes: if you add these, I’ll never switch! What’s that? Fix it myself? It is easier to move to python or ruby I think.

Is it a coincidence that languages with fixable syntax (Lisp, Perl, Tcl, Ocaml) have ‘lost’ to those with a fixed syntax (Java, Python)? Ruby dudes beware.

Supporting Your Language

There have been a fewposts floating around the blogosphere talking about writing posts supporting perl. I put my own effort into doing something similar for Emacs. However, in my opinion, Emacs needs the help and Perl does not.

Emacs could be greatly improved if there were many more Emacs Lisp hackers creating libraries and writing examples and documentation. Perl already has all of those things. <strike>As</strike> If its popularity wanes, what is lost? I guess people are thinking about job opportunities and stuff like that, but I suspect that the outflow of former Perl programmers will outpace the loss of Perl jobs.

Okay, this post is going to be quite long. I’m going to start with a basic problem I was solving in emacs lisp. From there I’ll segue into thinking about looping syntax and finally I’ll do a bit of benchmarking as I’ve got the code already and people seem to like that (the scheme, ocaml, c++ speed comparison is by far the most popular post on this blog followed by this).

Futzing around with Project Euler is something I do for fun. Most recently I was looking at problem 73 – count the reduced proper fractions with a denominator less than or equal to 10,000 between 1/3 and 1/2.

Emacs Lisp Solution

Emacs Lisp is usually my default language for doing this kind of thing as I’m already in my text editor and there is a REPL to experiment with.

First of all, it is clear that I’m going to need a function to calculate the greatest common divisor. I found an imperative Pascal implementation of Euclid’s algorithm here. A brief aside – I searched for Pascal deliberately as I generally find it very clear. Does anyone else do that?

Thinking ahead, I’ll probably know what the gcd is before we call make-fraction as only fractions with a gcd of 1 will be actually counted amongst the solutions. I’ve therefore made gcd an optional parameter as a nod to efficiency.

The most annoying thing is the primitive looping constructs. while is the basic and obvious built-in. It also has a slew of macros beginning with doXXX including dotimes and dolist not to mention the mighty common lisp loop macro.

I don’t know loop (but I’m going to learn it), but after messing about with do* for a few minutes, I realised it wasn’t the looping construct for me.

Now, the great thing about lisp is supposed to be that if you don’t like the syntax you can add your own with macros. Unfortunately, I haven’t got around to that yet as a bunch of people have already designed most of the syntax I like.

Scheme Solution

When I read some of the earlier posts on this blog, it seems that scheme has got some nice generator syntax (aka eager comprehensions) for handling nested loops.

So, Conclusions

For this particular task (looping and integer math) Emacs Lisp is slow, but not that slow compared with another scripting language. I really like the scheme looping constructs and mzscheme is surprisingly quick (again, just for this tiny thing), not too far from the ocaml – although again I should emphasise that the ocaml is a terrible hack. And finally, I need to learn how to use loop properly.

So much for good intentions. I get myself all geared up to
the problem I need to solve today? Well, I want to find out about how emacs networking works.

So first, I need a simple server to play with. Now normally when I think server I automatically think Apache but this time I want something a bit more basic. And if I was thinking enterprise1 I might reach for C++/ACE. However, for something basic, Perl is ideal.

I’ve just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 on this box and Perl is unused so let’s see if it has what I need.

06.52 Ubuntu finishes booting

I waste a few minutes on the internet.

06.57 I start Emacs

and remind myself just how gorgeous emacs-23 looks.

06.59 I check for the Net::Server package

$ perldoc Net::Server
You need to install the perl-doc package to use this program.
$ sudo apt-get install perl-doc
$ perldoc Net::Server
No documentation found for "Net::Server".

It is not installed. I could install it using apt (it is called libnet-server-perl) but I’ve got in the habit of using Perl’s CPAN module which provides package management facilities too. The advantage is that it is somewhat consistent across platforms.

During the course of a typical workday, in order to track down a problem, I often need to look at logfiles containing xml. The xml is usually poorly formatted and sometimes it is all on one line, making it very difficult to read. What would be ideal would be if I could extract the xml I am interested in into a buffer and pretty-print it with very little effort. The steps would be something like:

create a new buffer called *xml* in another window (C-x 4 b)

delete anything that exists in that buffer already

pretty print the xml into the new buffer

Did I gloss over step 3? That sounds pretty complicated right? Well, I can call a simple perl script from emacs. I’m pretty pragmatic and I don’t feel the need to code absolutely everything in emacs-lisp.

Actually, sgml-mode (xml-mode is just an alias) has a method called sgml-pretty-print but firstly I prefer the output from XML::Twig and secondly it is nice to see how easy emacs makes it to call out to an external process and return the results. Anyone without perl installed might prefer to replace the external call with a call to (sgml-pretty-print ...).